Focus on new faculty: Victor Zavala, optimizing algorithms for the interconnected modern world

Victor Zavala Photo: Renee Meiler

Cities across the nation draw energy from interlinked transmission lines—and coordinating where to send resources at any given moment requires thousands of split-second calculations based upon massive amounts of data.  

“At the national level, the problem explodes. There are many hundreds of thousands of gas and electric demand points,” says Victor Zavala, who joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in fall 2015 as the Richard A. Soit assistant professor. 

Zavala develops optimal control algorithms to manage the increasingly complicated, interconnected energy networks.